How 3D on the Big Screen Will Change Tech in Your Living Room

Getting directors to film important movies in 3D is just one step toward making the technology mainstream. The medium's next home? Your big-screen TV. PM's gadget guru explains why the transition is coming sooner than you think.

By
Seth Porges

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Fly Me to the Moon may be the first digital 3D movie to get an all-3D theatrical release, but it certainly won't be the last. What's more, theatrical runs are just the beginning of a film's revenue stream. And soon enough, studios will be looking for ways to cash in on 3D beyond the multiplex through TV broadcasts, airplane screenings, pay-per-view and DVD sales. That means bringing 3D off the big screen and onto the flat screen. And while the technology isn't quite there yet for re-creating a 3D theater-like experience at home, the next year will see a huge shift in that direction, as new home-oriented 3D technologies become available to consumers, and studios try to find ways to recoup production costs after a movie has left theaters.

There will be two types of 3D content available for home viewers: movies shot and sold as 3D discs, and 2D footage that is converted in real time into 3D through sophisticated software and hardware.

Today, a large number of DLP and plasma TVs are being billed as "3D-capable." But without the proper equipment and content, this feature largely goes unused. Software company DDD sells an accessory pack that allows anybody with a 3D-capable TV to watch any 2D DVD in 3D. The pack includes glasses, an emitter that will sync the glasses with the TV and a DVD containing software that will allow home viewers to perform real-time 3D conversion of any 2D DVD or PC-stored media file. Samsung introduced a branded version of the kit (with only one set of glasses) this summer. In order to take advantage of these, consumers will need to hook their PC up to their TV, and play the movies through the computer's DVD player.

Despite some high-end DIY attempts like from the startup Encyclopedia Pictura, instant conversions of 2D content into 3D don't look nearly as good as content that was made specifically for 3D using RealD technology, but they should improve as the technology becomes more sophisticated. "If the RealD 3D films are a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, these come off as a 6 or 7," says Douglas Hunter, vice president of licensing for DDD, the company that makes the conversion software for Samsung.

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Further down the line, TVs could come with built-in 3D-conversion technology, allowing for real-time transfer of any live television program. Hyundai IT makes and sells this kind of set in Japan now. Japan is also ahead of the game when it comes to 3D broadcasting. At least one Japanese TV station dedicates 30 minutes to an hour of airtime every night to 3D footage. To date, no stations in America have any plans for such broadcasts.

Widespread adoption of 3D for the home has technological hurdles as well. Currently, 3D looks best on DLP sets, and is possible on plasmas. But LCDs, which represent an enormous share of the American TV market, have difficulty showing the footage due to their slower refresh rates. There is a solution to this problem: a polarized filter built directly into the screen. Unfortunately, such a filter would add several thousand dollars to the cost of a TV.

There's also technology, known as autostereoscopic displays, that allows for 3D images to be seen without glasses. However, its quality is vastly inferior—more disorienting than impressive. Oddly, last year, Samsung actually released a cellphone in Korea that had glasses-free 3D built into it. Many Korean cellphones have the ability to stream live TV, and this phone transformed it into 3D. It wasn't cheap (it cost about $800), and apparently was not a success, as the product is no longer available.

In the next few years, the best-quality 3D home theater will be in DVD and Blu-ray releases of big-screen 3D films such as James Cameron's Avatar. Current 3D releases are either only being sold in 2D DVD (like Beowulf) or with the inferior red-and-blue glasses (like the Hannah Montana concert film). Consumers can also expect a number of classic movies to be rendered into 3D by studios. For example, we saw a scene from the original Star Wars transformed into 3D (it was the one where Darth Vader first appears), and it looked great. Such rendering takes a lot of time and care, however, and will likely only be done to best-selling classics.

Today's 3D movies are filmed digitally, typically using a single projector made by RealD. These projectors are powered by pumped-up versions of the same DLP chips that power rear-projection TVs, and the movies are viewed using polarized glasses that restrict the light that goes through each lens, allowing slightly different images to be seen by each eye, which in turn creates the illusion of depth. The result is far more realistic—and far less nausea-inducing—than older 3D movies. Though Fly Me to the Moon is for children and Journey to the Center of the Earth is as cheesy as it is immersive, the films do well at showing what's possible with 3D technology. Their theatrical releases are just a first step, however, in 3D's invasion of the American living room.